Monkey Time
“That’s a monkey”
“That is not a monkey”
“That is a monkey”
“That’s an armadillo”
“What monkey are you looking at?”
“I’m looking at that armadillo right there.”
“Look here, monkeys look exactly like that. That’s a monkey, sitting right there in the shade.”
“I don’t… Did you have breakfast this morning? I told you to have breakfast. I said you’d be hungry if you didn’t.”
“What has that got to do with the monkey staring at us?”
“It’s not a monkey.”
…
“Look, I’m sorry for my tone. I just - that isn’t a monkey.”
“It is. It is. Look at its tail.”
“The armadillo tail? Armadillos have tails too.”
“We might have to agree to disagree.”
“I wouldn’t take it that far.”
“See, I don’t want to spend all day arguing. I just don’t have the disposition for it. Not today at least.”
“It’s less of an argument and more of a dispute. A refutation of the facts.”
“As you see them. Semantics, anyway.”
“I told you to eat breakfast.”
“Armin, I know.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to.”
“Bet you regret it now.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Hi Hungry, I’m Insufferable.”
…
“Was that a joke?”
“It was fairly clever.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Look what the armadillo’s doing now.”
“Stop.”
“What?”
“Stop it.”
“What?”
“You’re trying to get under my skin. Trying to get a rise out of me.”
“I am not. Look at what that armadillo is doing. That’s amazing!”
“It’s a fucking monkey.”
“Language! There are young armadillos around.”
“You aren’t funny, you know that?”
“Well, talk about having to agree to disagree.”
[Various noises]
“You laugh at my jokes.”
“At your puns? And ‘word play?’ I’m being polite.”
“That’s not true. I can tell your fake laugh from your real.”
“Oh really? Is that so?”
“Let’s not do the When Harry Met Sally scene but with laughing alright?”
[Various laughing]
“So? Which was which?”
“I’m not indulging you.”
“Because you don’t know.”
“Because it annoys me.”
“Oh it annoys you? You know what annoys me? You -”
“Me being right about breakfast?”
“- talking to me about when or what to eat like you’re my mother or something. It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird. Why is it weird, because we’re both men or something? Is that what makes it weird to you?”
“No, because we’re friends. Don’t, like, make suggestions about how I should fulfill the basic needs of my existence.”
“That’s not… Saying you should eat breakfast this morning, before this full day excursion, is not an imposition on your autonomy. It’s like - it’s like if I said you should put sunscreen on.”
“Yeah: don’t tell me to put sunscreen on!”
“What? If I think you’re going to be burned, based on what I know about the UV on a given day, in a given setting, I shouldn’t suggest to you to put sunscreen on?”
“Honestly, no, you shouldn’t. I can make that decision. And if you do, you certainly don’t then go on and on about how you told me to put it on.”
“That’s ridiculous. Part of friendship is respecting the other person’s opinion. You could argue that that’s most of friendship.”
“Yeah. Give me your opinion on Mank, or a car you test drove, not what I put into my mouth in the morning, and whether or not I do so.”
“Or the fact that that’s an armadillo and not a monkey.”
“Right. Sure. You’re wrong, but that’s fine.”
“This not wanting to hear what I have to say about breakfast or sunscreen thing - this seems like an insecure masculinity thing.”
“Yeah, I know it seems that way to you. I could’ve predicted this entire conversation.”
“Okay? Good for you I guess?”
…
“One man, telling another man, a close friend, a friend close enough that they’d go on a two-week trip together, that maybe it might be a good idea for him to eat something to be prepared for the long day ahead - what is wrong with that? Does it seem like one man is taking a feminine role? Is that the problem?”
“Why do you have to generalize it into a discussion about masculinity and like, broad loose categories of thought and ideas. I personally don’t want you telling me whether or not I should be eating, or putting sunscreen on, or when I should go to bed.”
“Okay. Okay. And that’s your preference, that’s fine. There are nicer, simpler ways of saying so - of telling me that.”
“Oh my god! You’re the one bringing it up constantly! You’re the one who keeps telling me how you told me to eat breakfast this morning - which is by the way an exchange that I remember just as well because I was also there.”
“The only reason I’m mentioning it is because you’re so crabby Lyle! The explanation for the crabbiness is that you’re hungry!”
“I’m crabby? You’ve been just as acerbic as I have if not more so! You apologized for your tone not two minutes ago!”
“I apologized because you looked so sullen.”
…
…
“You’re still upset about that waitress two nights ago.”
“Can we please just stop talking?”
“I’m sure she just didn’t see the note you left. I thought it was sweet.”
“Stop. Be quiet.”
“She’s missing out.”
“Quiet. Let’s just listen to the sounds of nature.”
…
…
…
“She’d be lucky to have you.”
…
…
“Ah!”
“What?”
“Something flew into my eye. There’s something in my eye.”
“There’s nothing in your eye.”
“What do you know about my eye? There’s something in my eye! Ah!”
“I don’t see anything at all in your eye.”
“Oh, that’s interesting, because all I can see is the something in my eye!”
“Okay okay! Relax will you just stop jumping around so I can look?”
“What do you need to look for? Why would I need you to look? I know there’s something in there!”
“Look, I’ll get it.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“I can get it.”
“Stay away! Back! Back!”
…
…
“Is it out?”
“I think so.”
…
“Can you now see that that’s an armadillo?”
“Oh my god.”
“Let’s discuss something else… How’s the portfolio going?”
“It’s awful. I’m stuck.”
“You’re stuck?”
…
“How so?”
“What do you mean ‘how so’? I’m stuck. Unmoving. Not moving forward. Stationary.”
“What are you stuck on?”
“An elephant.”
“An elephant.”
“Yeah an elephant. A painting of an elephant.”
“I thought it was all drawings.”
“I’m doing some paintings.”
“Watercolor?”
“No.”
“Is it of an elephant we saw here?”
“No.”
“Where’d you see it?”
“The elephant? I imagined it Armin I imagined the elephant.”
“So what are you stuck on?”
“What?”
“If you imagined the elephant, can’t you just imagine it however you want and then paint that?”
…
“I don’t understand how you can be stuck .”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“No, really. I’m trying to understand. Please tell me - if it’s an imaginary elephant, in what way are you stuck?”
“Saying it’s imaginary… That’s not… The painting is in my head. Finished. It’s in here. I’m not changing it, I couldn’t really change it. I’m trying to get it out from in here and onto the canvas.”
“Michelangelo.”
“What?”
“Like Michelangelo. A finished sculpture exists within the marble, he just has to get it out. The painting is in your head, complete, but you need to transfer it onto the canvas.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you work on another painting while you’re stuck?”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Okay.”
…
…
…
…
“Maria is leaving me.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? That’s what you have to say? Oh?”
“Well I didn’t - you caught me by surprise is all.”
“Yeah.”
“Well. That’s terrible. What happened?”
“We were sitting by the pool at our tennis club, you remember the club, which was having a big Sunday barbecue for some celebration I can’t remember. Maybe it was part of a fifty-year anniversary or something. So it’s a big cookout and the grills are arranged in a line at one end of the enclosed area around the pool, next to a big table covered with a tablecloth with burger toppings and watermelon and condiments and plates and utensils and buckets of ice with sodas in them on it. There was a bar too, next to the long table, where adults could get beers and cocktails. And the sun that day was going in and out all day behind the clouds. In and out. But for the barbecue there was this long period where it was in, that is, not obscured by the clouds, which everyone was happy about.
And I had played that morning with Gene Terbis, who is a guy you would just absolutely hate because of how in-everybody’s-business he is, but we had played two whole matches, almost back-to-back, because Gene insisted, because he said he was going out of town next week so we should get extra playing in before he left, and I agreed even though I had a blister on my right ankle which, by the time we were done, had bled right through my sock staining it maroon, but I had figured, when Gene asked me to play another match and I was considering it, that the pain of a blister popping and rubbing against a sock and shoe for a couple of hours was quite unpleasant, but not great enough, that is, not high enough on the pain scale, that I should avoid doing something because of it, that that wasn’t the kind of man I want to be. I want to be the kind of man who plays through the pain, and not someone who shies away from it, given that the pain isn’t too great.
So I was tired. I was tired after our matches and a day in the sun, and looking forward to a beer, burger, some watermelon, and maybe even a dip in the pool, if I decided the pool wasn’t full of urine from all the club members’ kids, which it almost certainly was. And Maria is with me of course, and I had found us a couple of chaise lounges by the pool, which was impressive owing to the number of people at the event, many of whom were families anxious to find a place to put all of their items and belongings - sunscreen, hats, books, changes of clothes, laptops in the case of adults who needed to do some work, even on the weekend and during a family excursion, towels, etcetera - and thus found the chaise lounges, which were arranged in two rows on the west and east sides of the pool, an ideal ‘home base’, and made a great effort to claim several chaise lounges for themselves.
Maria quickly moved to the bar to get herself a margarita, she didn’t tell me what she was ordering at the time but I knew what she would order because it was her favorite drink and she especially loved licking the salt off of the rim of the glass, which I think most people who drink margaritas do, but she seemed, to me at least, to take special pleasure in it, but she found some of the club’s other women at the bar who are sort of friends of ours and was quickly drawn into conversation, which she seemed, by the half of her face I could see by my vantage next to our chaise lounges, grateful for. Although I knew the burger I planned on receiving from one of the club’s cooks, dropped onto the lower half of the bun on my plate by gleaming steel tongs, the ends of which were stained with brown meat residue, was going to be overcooked, I was excited for the watermelon. Watermelon has always seemed, to me, so decadent. Like fluffy pink cake.
And so I get my food and head back toward the chaise lounge I had placed my things on, when someone calls my name. It’s Annika, the daughter of one of the tennis club women, who’s seventeen or eighteen, a senior at Dwade Memorial High School. She walks over to me trailing a group of her friends, who are a mix of daughters of tennis club women and friends from school whose parents aren’t members of the club, and she says: ‘Hey Armin, we have a question for you, if you wouldn’t mind settling something for us.’ They’re all in bikinis and I hadn’t spoken to Annika in at least a year. So I say: ‘Sure, although I don’t know that I’ll be much help.’ And she tells me that I’m an adult and adults know things so I will be of help to her and her friends, who are, she tells me, having a disagreement about why, in her words, ‘old people become so crabby’, by which I infer the thrust of her question is: why do individuals often become more ill-tempered when confronted with change as they age.
One of Annika’s friends, who has bushy red hair and a mass of freckles concentrated primarily on her nose, interjects that they had recently been driving around the club’s acreage on one of the club’s golf carts - you might remember that the club also has a golf course, I call it our tennis club because I don’t play golf but I do play tennis there several times per week, and it was a tennis club before it incorporated golf two decades ago after a protracted and contentious two-year negotiation with the city during which careers in both the city bureaucracy and the tennis club’s management were made and lost - so they’re in the golf carts and were apparently accosted by an elderly man who reprimanded them for their volume, volubility, manner of dress, and who told them that they shouldn’t be driving a golf cart because it was dangerous and they were too young, and in fact that they shouldn’t even be wandering the club’s grounds unsupervised, and that he’d be speaking not only to the front desk but to one of the club’s day managers, Marcus, who was on duty at the time of the incident.
The elderly man had evidently resembled a broom wrapped in darkly orange leather. The group of young women then made several jokes at the old man’s expense before Annika sited her own father’s increasing tendency, as he aged, to become more agitated when he found things not to be as they should, in his estimation, be, as another example concerning the group’s point-slash-question. I told them that I thought I understood what they were basically asking, and that I thought - you’ll like this I think, although I could be wrong, but I believe I recall us having an adjacent conversation a few years ago - I told them I thought that as people aged their brains ossified, and any kind of flexibility became more and more difficult, for many people to the point where the very conception of a fluid mind, possibility tree, and different manners of response to incoming stimuli vanished altogether, which meant that when something was deemed amiss by such a person that classification of ‘amiss’ was never, could never be questioned, and thus needed to be solved by either the person themself, e.g. the elderly gentlemen who had given them a dressing down, or by someone capable of helping the older person, who would be induced to help by the older person’s incessant complaining-slash-remarks regarding whatever they had decided was wrong, and that these two behavioral responses were what Annika and her friends observed in older people. Although, I then noted to the young women, some elderly people progressed in the other direction, becoming increasingly ‘chill’, as they (the young women) would put it, I said, as they aged, and these were the rare elderly who exuded a serene calm.
Annika said she thought this was a great answer, and she wasn’t even going to tell me what the two sides of the girls’ debate about the issue had been because they made much less sense than what I had just said did. I told her that I was sure this wasn’t true, and she slapped me on the arm. At this point Sandra Peterson and Melissa Cowel, who is Annika’s mother, came over to where we were standing by the pool. Melissa remarked that her daughter never looked as interested as she had while I was answering her question when Annika was listening to her, that is, listening to Melissa. And I told her I was sure that wasn’t true and then she also slapped my arm and we proceeded with pleasantries for a few exchanges before Sandra Peterson asked me where Maria was and if she was here. I pointed over to the bar where my wife was talking with her friends and, as the women I was with all looked, I could see that Maria was looking back at me with an expression that screamed trouble for me later. You know how it is. Sandra and Melissa wave and turn back to me and compliment me on how engaged all the girls (here gesturing to Annika and her friends) were speaking with me, and how such captivation was rare for men/husbands to be able to produce in young women in intellectual conversation, which was a point that Melissa had already made when she quipped that Annika looked more interested in what I was saying than she, Annika, ever was in what her own mother was saying, but here Melissa and Sandra were making the point more formally, and I brushed the compliment aside as best as I could because I felt ambivalent about being told I was fascinating a group of adolescent young women, all of whom were wearing bikinis, as I’ve mentioned.
But so anyway I can see you’re getting bored so I’ll skip forward and just say that as we’re getting into the car to head home post barbecue, I can see that Maria is clearly angry. Her eyebrows are always a dead giveaway, and here they were drawn down and cartoonishly angled. And I wait until we’re out of the parking lot and on our way home to ask what’s wrong, and in response she goes into one of those condescending explications that spouses sometimes give, delineating every little thing you did wrong that day, one after another, and often implicit in some of these transgressions is an understanding, on the accusing spouse’s end, that you didn’t know you were committing an infraction, but the big thing plainly is my talk with the women, both young and mature, by the pool, and here she focuses on Sandra and Melissa, but I can tell she was also miffed about me speaking with all of the young women as well but doesn’t want to say anything because she thinks it will make her sound shallow or crazy or perverse or something, but I can tell that bothered her too, and she basically uses that whole situation, with plenty of expounding upon how good I must’ve felt, and how I was deliberately not paying her, my wife, any attention, was in fact ignoring her in favor of the company of other women, and here there was a clear unspoken nubility issue that, again, she didn’t explicitly mention, and so uses the whole situation as a kerosene-soaked match to light the burner beneath her long-simmering discontent with me and our marriage. Today was, apparently, emblematic of my awful, hurtful, and - as she would have it - downright evil husband-ing, husbandry I should say, and long story short she told me she didn’t love me anymore and wanted a divorce.
…
…
“I’m sorry. And I’m here for you.”
“Thanks.”
…
“How’s your dating life?”
“Nonexistent. Terrible. What’s it doing now?”
“Cleaning itself maybe?”
“Looks weird.”
“Yeah.”
…
“Maybe you can paint it.”
“Yeah.”
…
…
…
[Various noises]
Tourists On Safari Killed by Aardvark, First Recorded Case
Two tourists in Kenya were killed by an aardvark at approximately 3 PM on Monday June 14th. The incident occurred just outside Tsavo East National Park, where the tourists were engaged in an illegal safari tour. We spoke to the tour guide, a native of Kenya, who agreed on the condition that he remain anonymous.
“I do these safaris. People come to me and pay much less with me than in the national parks. The two men took my car, the car for the safaris, when I was urinating in the bush. They left me in the bush and stole my car. I tracked them and when I found my car they were dead on the ground.”
Dr. Lila Hoover Smileck, a zoologist at Rutgers University, commented on the incident: “This is very strange - unheard of in fact - not only because aardvarks are considered docile prey animals, but because they’re nocturnal, and usually spend all day in their burrows. I have to imagine that the victims did something to provoke the aardvark. This incident, assuming it’s been reported correctly, is the kind of thing that becomes zoology lore.”
The victims were found with fingers interlaced. We spoke with a mortician who stated that the victims “must have been holding hands when killed”. The spouse of one victim declined to comment, and
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